After another very slow week last week, with just a little progress made, Marisol and I went to the school´s closing day, pretty sure that they hadn't finished the work, but with just a tiny bit of hope that they had ... and I´m afraid we were right. A bit more work had been done to the floor, with the first layer of concrete down, but the work was not finished - a second chimney was still to be delivered and fitted, all the painting was still to be done, no table or shelves had been built, and no windows fitted, and so we were pretty disappointed! We'd been told it would all be done in three days easily and that the parents would then clean up the playground area too.
And what was worse, as I do think the kitchen will get finished in time, so money not wasted ... was that the parents just ignored us and so did the teachers. None of the promised cleaning up of the playground had been done either - in fact the parents had done no work whatsoever in the two weeks, nor had the teachers done anything to encourage any cleaning up of the school, so we just left in disgust. I just walked out as I really couldn't cope with it, and Marisol told them what she thought of them and that she was not going to work with them anymore.
I hope the money we spent on materials for the new kitchen will eventually prove to be money well spent, but I must admit this has been a most disheartening and frustrating project, and if I ever do this kind of thing again I will find people who really want to get involved and who relish the opportunity to use a donation to make some really positive changes. I also think that it would be better to work with an organisation here, as doing this on my own most days was way too much of a challenge!
So sorry that this is a bit of a sad ending, but time to move on to other things, and let's hope they are more positive
Work in progress, December 2008
The sink outside - not quite the right way to use it, but at least water now connected!
No comments:
Post a Comment